Susanna Kaysen is the author of the novels Far Afield and Asa, As I Knew Him and the memoir Girl, Interrupted. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Photo (c) Marion Ettlinger

The Camera My Mother Gave Me takes us through Susanna Kaysen’s often comic, sometimes surreal encounters with all kinds of doctors—internists, gynecologists, “alternative health” experts—as well as with her boyfriend and her friends, when suddenly, inexplicably, “something went wrong” with her vagina.

The title comes from Luis Buñuel’s film Viridiana. Some peasants are at a banquet in a country mansion. They ask a maid to take a group snapshot, and she obliges, lifting up her skirt and using the “camera” that’s underneath.

Kaysen’s The Camera My Mother Gave Me observes what happens when sexual pleasure is replaced by pain. “When eros goes away,” she writes, “it’s as if I’m colorblind. The world is gray.” But is this a problem of body, or mind? And can clinicians tease out the difference between the two?

Spare, frank, and altogether original, The Camera My Mother Gave Me challenges us to think in new ways about the centrality and power of sexuality. It is an extraordinary investigation into the role sex plays in perception and our notions of ourselves—and into what happens when the erotic impulse meets the world of medicine
"An engrossing examination of pain and the psychology and philosophy used to confront it. Kaysen's lack of conceit and straightforward prose keeps her story clean and absorbing. [She] successfully avoids the self-pity that often seeps into contemporary memoirs. Eve Ensler...pulled a private part out from under the covers. Kaysen dives back in, taking readers with her for a closer look. Even those who still blush when they utter the "V" word will find themselves completely enveloped."--Susanna Baird, Boston Magazine